Page 77 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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as well as for other important individual and community matters. If men try to stop
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women from attending these walargee (meetings), it is considered against saffu.”
Oromo women used different siiqqee mechanisms to maintain their rights; such
mechanisms included the law of muka laaftu (soften wood), the abaarsa (curse), iyya si-
iqqee (scream), and godaana siiqqee (trek). Kumsa comments that “Because of their lim-
inality, women wield a special religious power where they draw an enormous moral
and ritual authority. Men, therefore, try to avoid their curse and seek their bless-
ings. . . .‘Women in general are symbolically and politically liminal and correspond-
ingly enjoy special sacred power as a class.’... People respect and revere a woman
because Waaq made her to be respected and revered. . . .[I]nterference with a woman’s
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A man who violated
sacred authority is regarded as violating seera Waaq and saffu.”
women’s individual and collective rights could be corrected through reconciliation
and pledging not to repeat the mistakes or through women’s reprisal ritual: A group
of women “ambush the offender in the bush or on the road, bind him, insult him ver-
bally using obscene language that they would not normally utter in the direct pres-
ence of an adult male, pinch him, and whip him with leafy branches or knotted strips
of cloth. In extreme cases, they may force him to crawl over thorny or rocky ground
while they whip him. . . .They demand livestock sacrifice as the price to cease their
attack. If he refuses, they may tie him to a tree in the bush and seize one of his ani-
mals themselves. Other men rarely intervene.” 114
With the colonization of the Oromo people and the destruction of gada and siiqqee
institutions, Oromo women have been subjected to three levels of oppression:
racial/ethnonational, class, and gender oppression. However, it is necessary to recog-
nize that internal factors such as class and state-formation processes, with their artic-
ulation with external factors, such as Turko-Egyptian colonialism, European and
Ethiopian colonialism, the emergence of an Oromo collaborative class, and the spread
of Islam and Christianity, undermined the political and military roles of the gada sys-
tem in the nineteenth century. 115 However, these changes could not totally uproot
Oromo values and traditions. Some elements of Oromo democratic values are still
exist in areas where the gada system was suppressed.Nevertheless,in its modified form,
the system is still in practice in southern Oromia, such as in the Borana and Guji re-
gions, under Ethiopian colonialism; gada still helps to maintain peace, exchange
knowledge, and practice rituals among some moieties and groups in southern Oro-
mia. 116 Today some Oromo nationalists attempt to mobilize these cultural and politi-
cal values, recognizing that Oromos can easily understand the objective of the Oromo
national movement through these cultural devices.
Although the Oromo struggle mainly started as a political movement, it gradually
mobilized a few Oromo intellectuals and other students of Oromo society to study
Oromo culture and history. Particularly, a few Oromo intellectuals in the diaspora and
other students of Oromo society, who were later prevented from studying Oromo so-
ciety in Oromia by successive Ethiopian regimes, started to explore the main features
of Oromo culture. In the 1980s and 1990s, intellectuals from the left and right found
themselves on a shaky foundation in addressing the problems of indigenous peoples
like that of Oromia.At the same time, when a few Oromo intellectuals and other stu-
dents of Oromo society were engaged in studying Oromo culture, Oromo revolu-
tionaries who initiated the political and armed struggle in Oromia discovered that the
Oromo nationalist ideology that was based on a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist approach
was not attractive to the Oromo people. This style of leftist approach was alien to